Low-income African American Fathers’ Responsibility for their Children's Negative Emotions

• In Event: Paternal parenting

Abstract

Toddlerhood is a critical time for the development of emotion-related competencies (Bocknek, 2018). Children begin to engage in the larger family system during toddlerhood through increased language skills and understanding in play activities, and expanded emotional development and experiences (Brophy-Herb, Bocknek, Choi, Senehi, & Douglas, 2018). Parents are especially influential on their children’s emotional development during the period of toddlerhood. One way to assess parenting or parent-child relationships is through the process of parental emotion socialization (PES). PES encompasses implicit and explicit messages that parents transmit to their children about emotion (Eisenberg, Cumberland, & Spinrad, 1998a;b). The nature of PES during early childhood is well-documented (Zinsser, Gordon, & Jiang, 2021), but not among low-income ethnic minority parents and particularly fathers (Cabera, Volling, & Barr, 2018; Gerhardt et al., 2020). As such, qualitative approaches are necessary to capture culturally-relevant PES as a basis of future quantitative measurement. The current study explored two indicators of PES, parental emotion socialization behaviors and parental emotion-related beliefs among a sample of low-income African American fathers of toddlers. Data were collected as part of a larger study of resilience among high-risk families with a target child between 24 and 31 months old. Participants in the current study included biological fathers (n = 57) and a stepfather (n = 1) between the ages of 29 and 40 (Mage = 30.94). We analyzed fathers’ responses to a subset of semi-structured interview questions about parents’ and their children’s negative emotions (i.e., sadness, anger; Meta-Emotion Interview, MEI; Katz & Gottman, 1986). We conducted a thematic analysis of fathers’ MEI responses using a deductive orientation and the reflexive, codebook, coding reliability approaches (Braun & Clarke, 2019; 2021). We interpreted five themes among African American fathers’ responses: 1) responsibility for children’s emotions, 2) complex relationship with anger, 3) reckoning negative emotions, 4) children at the center, and 5) actively working through emotions. Theme 1 was particularly salient for the developmental period of toddlerhood. African American fathers in our study embraced the responsibility of parenting and PES. They carefully taught their children about negative emotions by validating and dismissing their children’s emotions at times. Fathers did not want to create unrealistic expectations for their children as they develop over time. Interestingly, some fathers implied that their children were too young to process emotions at the time. It is possible that these fathers were underestimating their children’s emotion-related abilities considering that toddlerhood is a time of increased self-regulation behaviors for children that essentially are the foundation for emotion regulation behaviors later in life (Brophy-Herb et al., 2018). This finding among the responsibility for children’s emotions theme suggests that African American fathers’ developmental knowledge may serve as a culturally appropriate point of intervention in the PES process to improve emotional development during toddlerhood. This is not to say that African American fathers are parenting incorrectly, as this population has already been scrutinized enough and inaccurately (Mattis et al., 2021). Nonetheless, it can empower African American fathers to further embrace the responsibility they feel for children’s emotion.

Authors

• Deon Brown, Texas A&M University - College Station
  Presenting Author

• Summer Bryant

• Fantasy T. Lozada, Virginia Commonwealth University

• Erika London Bocknek, Wayne State University